Can you not understand why black people are angry?

All lives do matter, but not all lives are in constant jeopardy.

I can honestly say that the Black Lives Matter movement does not believe or insinuate that all police officers are bad, just like people of color have been trying to prove for decades that all black people aren’t bad regardless of the stereotypes or way that we are constantly and negatively portrayed by the media.

Statistics show that cops have killed more white people than black people, yet since African Americans make up 13% to 15% of the entire U.S. population while Caucasians are 77% of the population, black people are literally just proclaiming that we are getting killed at a faster rate and have been getting killed for a longer period of time by police officers.

The Black Lives Matter movement has now been accused of having no respect for police authority. People are saying the shooting in Dallas shows what a black man equipped with training and motivated by anger could be capable of doing. In addition, there have been whispers of African American retaliation spreading after the last two videos of police brutality proved that the marches and rioting solved nothing.

It temporarily silenced the officers who were using their badges to feed their sick need to murder innocent people both black and white, and even cost the government thousands of dollars equipping officers with body cameras. Sometimes those cameras are conveniently either facing the wrong way, or not charged, or even covered up when they should be filming.

All cops are not bad, but the bad ones are very active. If we want to be honest, when there’s a bad cop in your area and no one reports him — not even his own unit — that says that you support his behavior. That is where we all have to take responsibility. We all decided to stay silent until we are forced to scream.

Anyone who takes a life is selfish. They are temporarily acting on their emotions and not thinking about the mothers, siblings, children and other people involved in that individual’s life that they took.

I am angry that the news has covered more about the black sniper in Dallas than it has focused on the officers that took the lives of those two black men who received point-blank chest shots.The officers knew those close-range shots would result in death.

So now the five officers shot by one man are more important than the two men shot by cops with multiple officers surrounding their fresh corpse, arresting their girlfriends and checking their pockets?

Can you not see why we are angry? Those officers are on paid leave and now all other officers are fearing for their lives the same way all black men fear for their lives when they see a cop car.

All lives do matter, but not all lives are in constant jeopardy. In this case we cannot blame the movement; we cannot blame African Americans; we cannot blame the police; we can only blame ourselves for not understanding the value of life — of all lives whether we like or dislike characteristics about each other.

Leona Dunn is a Tennessee State University student and news editor for The Meter, the campus newspaper.